Yi Seong-gye
Yi Seong-gye was sent to invade China in 1388, turned his army round at the Yalu instead, and four years later founded the dynasty that ruled Korea until 1910. He was a frontier general from the north-east, the son of a Goryeo commander who had served the Mongols, and he made his name in the 1360s and 1370s destroying the Red Turban armies that had sacked the capital and the Japanese pirates who were emptying the southern coast. Goryeo by then was a state whose kings were Mongol puppets, whose land was owned by monasteries and a few families, and whose ministers were divided between those who looked to the collapsing Yuan and those who looked to the rising Ming. In 1388 the court sided with the Yuan and ordered Yi to take the Liaodong peninsula from the Ming. He marched to Wihwa Island in the Yalu, argued that a small state should not attack a large one in the rainy season with a plague running, and marched back on the capital when the argument was refused. He deposed the king, deposed his successor, executed the chief minister who had given the order, and spent four years as the power behind two boy kings while the reformers around Jeong Do-jeon redistributed the land and the monasteries were stripped. In 1392 he took the throne himself, named the state Joseon after the ancient kingdom, moved the capital to Hanyang, the site of Seoul, and accepted investiture from the Ming, which fixed Korea's foreign policy for five hundred years. Neo-Confucianism became the state creed and Buddhism a tolerated private habit. He could not settle his own succession: in 1398 his fifth son Yi Bang-won killed the designated heir and Jeong Do-jeon in a night, and Yi abdicated in disgust, went home to Hamhung, and is said to have shot at the messengers his son sent to bring him back. He died in 1408. Korea calls him Taejo, the Great Ancestor, which is what the founder of a dynasty is called and, in his case, what he was.
- Lived: 1335 CE – 1408 CE
- Nationality: Korean
- Roles: king, monarch, head_of_state, general
